how many old school DOS programmers are left?

This is a discussion on how many old school DOS programmers are left? within the A Brief History of Cprogramming.com forums, part of the Community Boards category; I've been noticing that from the time that i registered here, to now, there's been a HUGE drop off in ...

how many old school DOS programmers are left?

I've been noticing that from the time that i registered here, to now, there's been a HUGE drop off in the number of posts on the DOS board. And frankly I'm both frightened and dissappointed, I love DOS to death, and I always write every program in DOS before porting it to windows just for the ease of getting something working.

I just wanted to know how many old school DOS geeks we had left here, go ahead and drop me a line....maybe discuss what you think is happening with the lack of DOS programmers coming out of the chute.

I used to program a lot in DOS, mainly because it was easy working, you could do a lot in DOS. Currently I have a Windows system running and use it also to develop programs, most of them are Windows console applications.

I know just a little about Windows programming, I have learned using MFC and Windows API functions to create simple applications, it is not the way of programming that I prefer. I prefer doing low level programming, also made it my job.

A lot of beginning programmers have a Windows system and probably don't even know how a real DOS system would look like. They grow up with Windows systems.

BTW, I also noted that the number of postings on the C-board has decreased the last half year (?). In the beginning when I started here.

Which is why I think it's odd that so many schools still teach old stuff. Until about 5 years ago, my high school still taught Pascal as its only programming language. Until about 3 years ago, my university taught FORTRAN. For some reason, my university doesn't teach C++, except (and this isn't for sure) in high level CS classes. It's C everywhere, except in the beginning classes, where it's Java.

About 6 years ago I started at university, we learned programming with Pascal for one year on a DOS system. The next year we turned to C programming. In the last two years we got C++. Currently, the students start learning Java on Windows machines.

At my company we had a few computer science students working on a project their study at university. They knew Java and just a little C++.

I noticed that electrical engineering students get much more programming now, than in the days I started with electrical engineering study. I also noticed computer science studies have removed a lot of low level programming from their study-programs and a lot of low level programming is currently taught at electrical engineering studies. Funny to see how software development is spreading across the studies.

Nothing wrong with that, as long as you are pursuing a science course , with some IT. The majority of true scientists I know use Fortran daily as their first language - it is much more flexible when it comes to processing mathematics - it is, after all, what it was designed to do - FORmularTRANslator.

These days, I would not advocate learning Fortran in an IT based degree with little hard science, it's too specialised.

>>Until about 5 years ago, my high school still taught Pascal as its only programming language.

you think thats bad at my vocational school (i just graduated last year) they taught COBOL as a freaking language...the school was like, we pride ourselves on cutting edge technology, my teacher told me that if i wanted it to change i had to persuade the freaking board of directiors to get them to teach c++ as part of the curriculum. anyway, about dos, xp is trying to ax the whole dos thing, so its kinda hard for people to get into it ya know, cuz who knows if it'll be around in 10 years?